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[Untrustedlife]

The HFS is already a gateway to another dimension.  A gateway to the heavens would presumably be similar, except with all those Fun vault dwellers hanging around instead of clowns. (What, did you expect them to be singing choruses in togas?  This is the game where "good" means "unicorns will impale you for getting too close to their bubble grass".)

Hehe, df is essentially a dark fantasy game isnt it.
Good means evil, evil also means evil, the world is out to murder you.
Night trolls that kidnap people and turn them into fellow night trolls and forcibly mate with them etc.
Gods who are best buds with demons...

I think TV tropes actually classifies df as dark fantasy at this point doesnt it?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkFantasy
^ yep its in the "Videogame" list at the bottom.

[ZM5]

Yeah, it pretty much is a dark fantasy in it's current state.

Even the gods of what would appear to be benevolent spheres can consort with demons and bring them into the world after "pondering the ineffable subtleties of rainbows/family/marriage/etc". Not to mention that they hand out curses just as often as gods of death, darkness, etc, and no gods yet hand out actual blessings (unless you count "slab with knowledge of life and death" as a blessing).

Evil in DF really just means evil-er. Atleast in good biomes you only really have to fear the wildlife like everywhere else, even though unicorns are probably more exotic than even giant elephants. In evil biomes the weather itself is trying to kill you (I guess it does in cold biomes too just like in real life but...hey, atleast there's no skin-melting mist).

[Untrustedlife]

I never said that a release must be perfect, I merely cautioned against expecting it would be a release with hundreds of spells that don't cause absolute mayhem with game balance.

If you're trying to say that one shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, then that's by all means an endorsement of everyone coming around to list the many possible edge case failures for Toady, even if not every one can be found, rather than dismissing such things as pessimism.
There is a limit to which cheating can be stretched without making the game impossible to play as anything other than an exploit-memorization game. An army of 50-ton steel blobs with full-body necrosis syndromes is essentially impossible for any military to defeat, and functionally requires obsidianization traps.

The cheating also needs to be balanced for both players that can randomly have access to virtually any type of magic, all types of magic, or no magic... which is an absurdly difficult ask.

Toady doesn't accomplish the (actually) impossible.  At best, he accomplishes the unprecedented, but he has mainly just done things that nobody would put the time or effort into doing, or which people believed would not be popular enough to warrant doing. 

What I'm opposed to is simply saying "Toady can do this thing that I can't even clearly define or have thought about all the way through, even if it's impossible because Toady does impossible stuff all the time!"

It's like saying, "Hey, people said making a plane that could go through the sound barrier was 'impossible', and now they say time machines are 'impossible', so clearly, time machines are going to exist any minute, now!"  No matter what the memes say, DF isn't going to become self-aware any time soon, and DF has a nasty tendency to make memes that fans angrily stick to as though it were true.  (Like, say, female dwarves with beards...)  Magic, in particular, is a hotbed for asking for the impossible or the badly-thought-out, which is why it demands strong pushback to ask people to think through what they really want, and consider the impact it will have on people with different play styles than one's own.

I mean , thats a fair enough crticism, really nothing to argue against there.

one shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

I suppose that is essentially what I meant.

[Escapism]

It's more difficult to give them their own distinct voices -- we already have a lot of data to work with that would help with characterization, but the amount of writing required and the way it all has to be chopped to pieces makes it a very difficult problem.

How would one go about doing this? I got the picture of doing something like I used to do in MS Word when I was younger: substituting various words with synonyms via right-clicking it and thus changing it to a different sentence while usually retaining some semblance of the original meaning.

e.g
"It was [inevitable/ineludible/imminent/assured/ordained/prescribed/unpreventable/foreordained/fated/impending]."

"A bandit gang led by Asloth Wraithserpents has been harassing people on the street!"

"A

[bandit/robber/marauder/outlaw/rogue/villain/mobster/criminal]

[gang/clan/company/crew/troop/party/band/troupe/pack/syndicate/clique]

led by Asloth Wraithserpents has been

[harassing/tormenting/attacking/bedeviling/plagueing/disturbing/intimidating]

[on the street/in town/hereabouts/around here/nearby]

!"

Seems like something that would be relatively easy to outsource to the community via the raws while also having the potential to have some charmingly roguelike way of describing things and allowing for proto-"distinct voices" and proto-dialects via having different patterns for different characters/civilizations.

[ChangelingVenom]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's more difficult to give them their own distinct voices -- we already have a lot of data to work with that would help with characterization, but the amount of writing required and the way it all has to be chopped to pieces makes it a very difficult problem.

How would one go about doing this? I got the picture of doing something like I used to do in MS Word when I was younger: substituting various words with synonyms via right-clicking it and thus changing it to a different sentence while usually retaining some semblance of the original meaning.

e.g
"It was [inevitable/ineludible/imminent/assured/ordained/prescribed/unpreventable/foreordained/fated/impending]."

"A bandit gang led by Asloth Wraithserpents has been harassing people on the street!"

"A

[bandit/robber/marauder/outlaw/rogue/villain/mobster/criminal]

[gang/clan/company/crew/troop/party/band/troupe/pack/syndicate/clique]

led by Asloth Wraithserpents has been

[harassing/tormenting/attacking/bedeviling/plagueing/disturbing/intimidating]

[on the street/in town/hereabouts/around here/nearby]

!"

Seems like something that would be relatively easy to outsource to the community via the raws while also having the potential to have some charmingly roguelike way of describing things and allowing for proto-"distinct voices" and proto-dialects.

I can see people going into the raws and replacing elves with "buttmunchers" or some other words haha

[ZM5]

I can see people going into the raws and replacing elves with "buttmunchers" or some other words haha

Don't give people ideas for an elf-hate modding collab.

[Witty]

Toady, you mentioned in the last FOTF reply that you are planning an "artifact" release before the first myth release - which will include among other things more thieving. Do you intend to use that opportunity to give kobold sites the same overhaul that the other civ sites have gotten?

[TheFlame52]

Will conquered sites ever be transformed into other site types? Like, say, the humans conquer the goblins. They pull down the dark fortress, fill the underworld gate with rubble, build a keep, incorporate some of the towers into a wall, and fill the trenches with dirt. The dark fortress is now a town, with maybe a few signs of its former status. Sort of like how goblins build towers and trenches in sites they conquer right now.

[Tuxfanturnip]

If it's not too late, I had an idea for transformation damage... First of all, there could be multiple transformation mechanics, eg. limited to humanoids so analagous body parts are missing, saves wounds for every state separately, or keeps wounds but can change them. (turn into a fox, lose tail, magic might decide that your tail corresponds to your left femur, so change back at your own risk) For the last one, and the strawberry plant example, there could be a fairly straightforward, if somewhat arbitrary system. With every body part having a size, transformation could simply preserve some "intact body parts:damaged body parts:missing body parts" ratio. The missing finger could as well be a toe or an eyelid. Rip a branch off a transformed tree and the shapeshifter could be missing an arm or, if they're unlucky, their head. You could use it to shuffle injuries around, exchanging blindness for a limp, but transforming while injured would usually be inadvisable. It would be interesting if you could, say, become a tree for a few months to heal. It wouldn't be easy or safe but it would be an option for healing permanent injuries.

[Spish]

Probably too late to be asking this, but...
Is stress going to be balanced for the next release? In a way, the experience feels slightly hollow with dwarves being perfectly content while everything is crumbling around them (plus it makes the sheriff's job real boring).

[MrWiggles]

Probably too late to be asking this, but...
Is stress going to be balanced for the next release? In a way, the experience feels slightly hollow with dwarves being perfectly content while everything is crumbling around them (plus it makes the sheriff's job real boring).

There been no word in the dev log that they've been working on Emotions, or stress. So, no, probably not.

[malvado]

So a few questions that are a little bit Personal :

*Do Toady and ThreeToe get any inspiration from Tv-series / Movies and popular books that are currently in progress? Game of thrones for an example? If that's the case do you have any examples of features that have been implemented or might be planned?

*Have you ever personalized someone into your game that you actually don't like? I know of a few people I'd add then hunt if I was developing a game...

[Alfrodo]

*Have you ever personalized someone into your game that you actually don't like? I know of a few people I'd add then hunt if I was developing a game...

I don't think there are any actual "characters" in the game. Only randomly generated ones with randomly generated personalities, inventories, appearances and histories.

[Dirst]

*Have you ever personalized someone into your game that you actually don't like? I know of a few people I'd add then hunt if I was developing a game...

I don't think there are any actual "characters" in the game. Only randomly generated ones with randomly generated personalities, inventories, appearances and histories.

That's true, but there could be creature types or event types that were inspired by real or fictional examples that Toady came across.  For example, he might have had a classmate who insisted that everything that happened was inevitable

[Putnam]

Nah, "it was inevitable" seems pretty damn wyrd to me.